Senegal is More than Just Good Food

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 

Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown is one of the better shows on television. After all, how often does a program devote an hour to the West African country of Senegal, as was the case recently?

Bourdain’s program concentrates on a country’s food, but Senegal is far more than excellent cuisine, with its unique intersection of West African customs, Islamic tradition and French European culture.

The establishment of coastal trading posts along its Atlantic coast by various Europeans gradually gave way to control of the mainland, culminating in French rule by the 19th century.

The French created the four communes of Saint-Louis, Dakar, Gorée, and Rufisque. They were the oldest colonial towns in French West Africa, and in 1848 the French extended the rights of full French citizenship to their inhabitants. Dakar would become the capital of all of French West Africa in 1902.

Colonial Senegal served as the anchor for the French colonial empire in west Africa, and Senegalese were teachers and functionaries throughout the vast region. They also fought in France’s European wars. 

Senegal peacefully attained independence from France in 1960, and Léopold Senghor, a Roman Catholic, was its first and longest serving president. 

Though a francophile who even served in the French National Assembly prior to independence, he was a poet and cultural theorist who personally drafted the Senegalese national anthem and also developed the concept of “négritude.” 

He defined it as “the sum of the cultural values of the Black world as they are expressed in the life, the institutions, and the works of Black men.” 

Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (An Anthology of the New Negro and Malagasy Poetry in French), published in 1948, would eventually become a manifesto for the négritude movement.

Senghor had been elected a deputy to the National Assembly from the colony in 1946, sitting with the French Socialists. But he insisted on a specifically African socialism born of a “Negro African re-reading of Marx” and so two years later he formed the Bloc Démocratique Sénégalais.

The Bloc would eventually merge with other groups and would lead the country to independence. Senghor was elected president of a sovereign Senegal in 1960 and would serve for 20 years. 

Senegalese are 95 per cent Muslim, with most adhering to one of the four main Sufi brotherhoods. They are led by Sunni religious teachers known as marabouts.

The country is home to almost 20 distinct ethnic groups. Almost half of the population of 13.6 million are Wolof, and about one-quarter are Fula. Along with French, Wolof is a lingua franca in the country.

With its moderate religious and political climate, Senegal has never experienced a coup d’état. However, this was tested in 2012, when then president Abdoulaye Wade tried to amend the constitution to run for a third term. 

In the face of massive street protests across the country, though, he withdrew the proposal. The current president, Macky Sall, has reduced the presidential term from seven years to five, saying he wanted to set an example within Africa, where many leaders cling to power beyond their allotted term.

“We have a moderate and tolerant Islam,” Sall remarked last year. As Bourdain himself said, “Senegal turns simpleminded assumptions and prejudice on their heads at every turn” and is “someplace that everyone, given the chance, should go.”